I’m seriously not sure if this is an Onion article or a legitimate piece from the Toronto Star. It’s entitled “The realm between he and she.”

Canadian singer-songwriter Rae Spoon identifies not as a woman, not as a man, but somewhere in between.

To Spoon, and what appears to be an increasingly vocal minority, gender is “more like a whole galaxy.”

Which introduces the problem of pronouns. Spoon says “he” has expectations of maleness, “she” of femaleness. So Spoon, 32, likes to be referred to as “they.” Others prefer “ze” and “hir” (pronounced hear) or “per” (short for person)

…

Australia and New Zealand now allow citizens to be neither male nor female on their passports. Canada and the U.K. are considering a similar move.

“This might be new for many of us,” concedes Sheila Cavanagh, sexuality studies program co-ordinator at York University, “but there is a reluctance to recognize a whole host of ways of being gendered that isn’t determined by our bodies. We have to challenge our presumptions that to be a man is to necessarily be masculine and to be a woman is to necessarily be feminine.”

…

Use of language can be fluid for some gender-variant people. Ivan Coyote, a writer who sometimes works with Spoon, likes to use “they,” but when performing in schools also uses she in self-reference. “I have a fairly masculine presence, so in schools I use “she” because I want to present as wide a spectrum as possible of what a female-assigned person or she person can look like.””

How does Coyote want to be referred for this story? “An artist. Author of 10 books. An activist with youth. A human being. A musician. I’m so many more things than my gender and so much more than someone who doesn’t fit into a gender box.”

…

For a while S. Bear Bergman, a writer, educator and storyteller, campaigned for “gender non-specific” pronouns, including ze and hir. Hir could be especially useful, Bergman argues, in applications to avoid awkward constructs such as “when the applicant has completed his/her portfolio . . . ” Why not make it simpler: “hir” portfolio.

But these words haven’t caught on because a marginalized group, “trans and gender-queer people,” are advocating for them, says Bergman. “There’s a part of me that hates the fact that they and them appear to be the words that are going to win and have cultural uptake.”

As for hir, people don’t know how to pronounce it. “I know new things are difficult and require people to stretch themselves, but just because we feel uncomfortable doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.”

Thomas Brooks’ Complete Works – Vol. 6, Pg. 276 (HT: Ref21)

A couple of weeks ago, Mark Horne was kind enough to subject himself to our first video blog, an interview on the question of infant baptism. Horne is a brilliant author, and we highly commend his blog, which you can find here. He’s the author of a biography of JRR Tolkien, a commentary on Mark, and most important for our purposes, a primer on baptism.

Please enjoy! We hope this will be a helpful resource for those in the church who are looking to explore infant baptism or are looking to defend it. It’s a long video, but is definitely worth your time. We’ve included a comprehensive list of the questions we asked Mark below. For those of you who don’t have time to watch the whole interview, we’ve included a timestamp beside each question so you can skip ahead and listen to it. Please leave any feedback that you have in the comments section. Enjoy!  (more…)

Recently I’ve been getting into Ajith Fernando, the leader of Youth for Christ in Sri Lanka. I am utterly blown away by the man’s heart and character. He’s a brilliant theologian who could have taken teaching positions at major evangelical seminaries across North America, but has chosen to stay in Sri Lanka and work with the teenagers that he feels called to disciple. He also lives on an unbelievably meagre income in order that the Sri Lankan poor that he ministers to wouldn’t feel out of place in his house. But, don’t listen to me. Listen to his son talk about his father. Ajith Fernando is truly a man above reproach.

As some have already begun the task of digging deeper into my father’s life and putting into writing their findings, I believe it’s my duty and delight to lay bare a few snippets from the life of this great man of God, aspects that have been pretty well hidden to the rest of the world.

First of all, he was and is to me, a loving father. One would wonder how he could ever have had time for me with the great many hats he had to wear. Leading an evangelistic organization with its many administrative duties (in a part of the world where specialists are rare!), writing 15 books that have caught the attention of the world, teaching and preaching around the world, relentless hours of sleepless nights spent trying to make the deep truths of scripture understandable, years spent carefully translating the Bible into Sinhalese, regularly discipling young Christians in YFC, mentoring pastors around the country, intimately getting involved in the lives of the of the poor in his church and yet he still made time for me.

As a child (and adult) I never felt a hint of contempt towards him or his ministry. Often he would come home after a tired days work and we would stroll off to the garden to play a game of cricket. When I got into athletics at the age of 10 my father would take me to the nearby play ground around 3 times a week where we would run the 100 meters race. Of course he would always beat me because of the advantage of a 6 footers long legs!! I could never forget the district Sports-meet in which I represented my school in the 100 meters race. Under the scorching heat of the hot Colombo sun, I nervously walked up to the starting point of the track. I almost felt my feet give away at the sight of the great big stadium. To make matters worse, the sight of other seemingly confident top runners in the district brought a shiver down my spine. I was alone, and my father was no where to be seen. At the blast of the gun the race began and I found myself already behind. And then it happened. Around 50 meters through the race I was at 4th place and from the corner of my eyes, I could see my father running alongside of us beside the steel railing of the stadium. He would have been making an absolute fool of himself. And then I heard the lion roar. My Father shouted “Go Asiri!!!”. I was back in my zone. I won the race!!

A few years before, it was at the heat of the civil war in our country, the guerrilla group that was fighting the government bombed a military compound that was right beside my school. I was eight years old. At the time my father was at a meeting around 3 kilometers away. His heart sank at the news of the bomb. He got on to his motor bike, breaking the speed limit he rushed to the scene. The police didn’t let him go past a certain point. So he left his bike on the road, jumped over a couple of walls and finally found me, safe in the middle of the school playground with just a minor scratch on my hand. He still claims this as the scariest day of his life.  (more…)

In 2009, I wrote a post called “Seven years of Brian…” after he penned The Last Word and the Word after that. It’s short so I’ll just repost it here:

I have a thought. Hopefully it’s a good one.

If you at any time in the past couple years read Brian McLaren’s The Last “Word”(?) and the “Word”(?) After That and thought hey, this guy is speaking truth to power, you are roughly seven years away from: a) totally apostatizing; or b) being indistinguishable from a mainline liberal Protestant.

I know this is a little punchy but I honestly think it’s going to happen if it hasn’t already. All theologies seem to have a certain drift affixed to them.

If a guy can sit down and stomach something like a John Piper sermon, at the very least I know his temptation isn’t going to drift in that way.

I remember regretting writing this post at the time because I thought my timing was off. I mean, why seven years and not twenty? But I kept the post up, hoping that I had effectively channeled my inner Nostradamus and gained the affections of my fellow blog contributors.

I think that my prediction with a) was a little strong, but b) was bang on.

Don’t believe me?

Consider Brian McLaren’s current stance on sexuality. And we’ve just learned that Rob Bell is now in the same boat. In a recent talk at San Francisco’s Grace Chapel, Bell said the following:

I am for marriage. I am for fidelity. I am for love, whether it’s a man and woman, a woman and a woman, a man and a man. I think the ship has sailed and I think the church needs — I think this is the world we are living in and we need to affirm people wherever they are.

I think we are witnessing the death of a particular subculture that doesn’t work. I think there is a very narrow, politically intertwined, culturally ghettoized, Evangelical subculture that was told “we’re gonna change the thing” and they haven’t. And they actually have turned away lots of people. And I think that when you’re in a part of a subculture that is dying, you make a lot more noise because it’s very painful. You sort of die or you adapt. And if you adapt, it means you have to come face to face with some of the ways we’ve talked about God, which don’t actually shape people into more loving, compassionate people. And we have supported policies and ways of viewing the world that are actually destructive. And we’ve done it in the name of God and we need to repent.

The reality is that the writing was on the wall with this all along. Consider Ben Witherington’s summary of how Bell spoke about this topic in 2007:

The second problem area is ethics, which became very apparent tonight when Rob Bell was asked about homosexuality. His answers was evasive in part, and disturbing in other parts, and clearly unBiblical in other parts and in this he sounds like some other leaders in the Emergent Church movement. Some specifics should be mentioned.

First of all, Rob made the blanket statement that you have no moral authority to speak on this issue unless you have gay friends and understand their struggle …

Secondly, Rob then makes an argument from silence which is in fact misleading. The argument is this— “Jesus never said anything about homosexuality” …

Rob then raises the issue of hypocrisy …

Rob then raises the point that the Bible says nothing about sexual orientation …

What interested me most about characters like McLaren and Bell on sundry controversial topics wasn’t so much what they said as to what they didn’t say.

It looks like what I thought was going to be a long slide down the toboggan hill to mainline liberalism happened much faster than expected. Bell and McLaren’s crazy carpet has some pretty impressive grease. I just hope other people realized this in time before they hit the fence at the bottom of the hill.

Sorry for the delay with my series on theological paradox, but things have been busy at the Brooks’ house. We just welcomed our firstborn to the world, a baby girl named Piper Joy Brooks.

Back to the series. This is post #2 on paradox and theology.

James Anderson’s Paradox and Christian Theology aims to show that paradox is at the heart of Christian theology as it is a necessary concept needed for speaking of God’s being. Some theologians, like Gordon Clark, David Basinger, Jerry Walls, and Doug Groothuis decry this. I’ll deal with some of their objections in later posts. For now, all you need to know is that Anderson grounds his belief in paradox in confessional doctrines surrounding the Trinity and Incarnation. I don’t plan on dealing with the Incarnation, so for now we’ll just stick with the Trinity. Anderson believes that the choice that stands before us with regards to Trinitarian reasoning is to be orthodox and affirm paradox or to deny paradox and be heterodox. There is no middle ground.

Anderson demonstrates this by giving an overview of Trinitarian squabbles. He begins by noting the third century Monarchian heresy. Being strong monotheists, Monarchians affirmed the numerical unity of God. There could be no distinctions between Father, Son, and Spirit. According to the Monarchians, if the Father is God, no one else could be, as that would unravel any meaningful understanding of monotheism.

What is instructive about this controversy is how the early church responded to it. Anderson points out three responses. 1) They affirmed the Monarchist’s basic monotheistic premises, but resisted the inferences made from those premises; 2) they pointed out passages of Scripture that were overlooked by the Monarchists – passages of distinction between the Father and Son; 3) they used Greek philosophy as a tool to help affirm distinctions between Father and Son whilst avoiding the charge that they were ‘dividing the monarchy’ and jettisoning monotheism.

It is noteworthy just how similar the heresy of Monarchianism is to Arianism. Anderson writes,

Both parties began with the orthodox conviction of absolute monotheism. Both parties conjoined this premise with another uncontroversial theological tenet: for the Monarchians, the affirmation that Christ is God; for the Arians, the affirmation (previously defended by the anti-Monarchians) that the Son is distinct from the Father.

What we see here is that in both cases the early church affirmed the premises of their theological sparring partners, but resisted the implications and conclusions drawn from them.

As the dialogue with Arius turned into a condemnation of Arianism as heresy with the Council of Nicea, the church showed that their ultimate concern wasn’t ultimately coherence, but fidelity to Scripture and tradition. Anderson points out that the concern for coherence was really the ground level concern of the Monarchists and the Arians. Philip Schaff comments on this by contrasting Arianism with Athanasian orthodoxy, “the one made reasonableness, the other agreement with Scripture, the criterion of truth.”

For the next post, we’ll look at what the early church meant by homoousion, and use that to examine whether modern attempts by social Trinitarians, like William Lane Craig, to avoid paradox are successful.

So, Lord willing, we’re set to have a Skype interview with a good ol’ Presbyterian paedobaptist, Rev. Mark Horne. Our discussion, which will be posted here, will take place sometime next week. In the meantime, while I compile a list of questions for him, is there anything that you would want to ask him? Rev. Horne has written a primer on the subject, Why Baptize Babies? He’s also penned a polemical defense of the position, which can be seen here.

What would you like to see me ask Rev. Horne? What do you think is the strongest argument for believer’s baptism? The strongest argument against infant baptism?

I’m looking forward to this and hope you are too.

Also, I’d like to arrange an interview with a credobaptist on this topic. Any suggestions?

Roger Hanlon studies camouflauge in cephalopods – squid, cuttlefish, and octopus. Here you can see on video just how much of a master the octopus is at optical illusion.

Creation is boss (HT).

So, apparently Rob Bell has a new book coming out called What we talk about when we talk about God. Denny Burk has already put up a shot across the bow. I’m not a fan of Rob Bell by any stretch of the imagination (see here, here, here, here, and here) but I have to admit that he knows how to turn a phrase. I love how the trailer finishes:

The message of the book is essentially that God is not behind us, dragging us backwards into some primitive regressive state. God has always been ahead of us pulling us forward into greater peace, integration, wholeness, and love.

A-men. It’s a great thought, I just think my conservative, confessional and evangelical theology serves as a much better backdrop for it.

The point of this post isn’t so much to talk about Bell’s new book. To be honest, I look for any opportunity to share a hilarious spoof of Rob Bell’s book trailers by the good lads at Christ Kirk and New St. Andrew’s College in Moscow, Idaho. They raise them right in those parts of the hinterland.

If you haven’t seen this, please don’t put it off. If you want some context, watch this Rob Bell clip. Life changing stuff below. Well, not quite life changing, but still worth the three minute commitment.

Most of man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best of this or that material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things, which we thought our own, but were really due to good digestion, will fall of some of us; all sorts of complexities which were due to complexities or bad health, will fall off others. We shall then for the first time, see everyone as he really was. There will be surprises.

C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, pg. 86

I'd been looking for this quote for quite some time and was delighted to see it in Ravi Zacharias' The Grand Weaver.

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